Sundance Acquires Four Documentaries

3/12/2004 7:03 AM Eastern

By: By Multi Channel News Staff

Sundance Channel has secured the pay TV rights to a quartet of documentaries that premiered at the recent Sundance Film Festival.

Senior vice president of film programming Paola Freccero said the network has acquired the rights to: The Five Obstructions, by Jorgen Leth and Lars Von Trier; Garden, by Ruthie Shatz and Adi Barash; Investigation Into the Invisible World; and Screaming Men, by Mika Ronkainen.

In The Five Obstructions, Von Trier documents his challenge to fellow Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth to remake his 1967 short film, The Perfect Human, five different ways with five different obstacles set out for him.

Garden follows the lives of two young male prostitutes working in the "electricity garden" in downtown Tel-Aviv, exposing not only a harsh reality of teen-age prostitution, but the complexities of being a Palestinian, an Arab-Israeli and an immigrant in Israel.Investigation Into the Invisible World examines Icelandic beliefs in the supernatural, from elves to sea monsters to ghosts, and their history relative to the Icelandic Church’s openness to pagan traditions.Screaming Men is a light-hearted look at conductor Petri Sirviö and his Screaming Men Choir, a group of Finnish men who scream anthems and folk songs.